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Abstract People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how these visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. To examine how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perception, we conducted two experiments online in October and December of 2020 (N= 2549) where we presented participants with 34 visualization techniques (available at the time of publication on the CDC’s website) of the same COVID-19 mortality data. We found that visualizing data using a cumulative scale consistently led to participants believing that they and others were at more risk than before viewing the visualizations. In contrast, visualizing the same data with a weekly incident scale led to variable changes in risk perceptions. Further, uncertainty forecast visualizations also affected risk perceptions, with visualizations showing six or more models increasing risk estimates more than the others tested. Differences between COVID-19 visualizations of the same data produce different risk perceptions, fundamentally changing viewers’ interpretation of information.
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Measuring the Separability of Shape, Size, and Color in Scatterplots
Scatterplots commonly use multiple visual channels to encode multivariate datasets. Such visualizations often use size, shape, and color as these dimensions are considered separable--dimensions represented by one channel do not significantly interfere with viewers' abilities to perceive data in another. However, recent work shows the size of marks significantly impacts color difference perceptions, leading to broader questions about the separability of these channels. In this paper, we present a series of crowdsourced experiments measuring how mark shape, size, and color influence data interpretation in multiclass scatterplots. Our results indicate that mark shape significantly influences color and size perception, and that separability among these channels functions asymmetrically: shape more strongly influences size and color perceptions in scatterplots than size and color influence shape. Models constructed from the resulting data can help designers anticipate viewer perceptions to build more effective visualizations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657599
- PAR ID:
- 10111568
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '19 Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Paper No. 669
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300899
